DAR AL HARB/ISLAM - U.K.: NO RETREAT?!?

No retreat from the War on Terror
If the West backs out of Afghanistan the consequences would be plainly catastrophic
by David Aaronovitch

In recent days, and unsurprisingly, it has become common to hear the mournless rites being read for liberal interventionism. If anyone has opined publicly about Afghanistan in the last week - and plenty did - it was to regret our presence there and to wish us away. If ever an argument was being won by default this was it, especially since those making the case for quitting were far too exuberant to want to slow up and allow for the possible objections to their reasoning.

It was Condoleezza Rice, agitating for more Nato troops to be deployed in Afghanistan, who precipitated the current poison-ivy rash of isolationist critiques. This week in Lithuania Nato defence ministers are meeting to discuss finding 7,500 more troops to reinforce the existing 42,000, and last week there was a run-in between the Americans and the Germans over whether Bundeswehr resources could be sent to the dangerous south - a spat that the Bundesmedia seemed to enjoy a bit too much.

To which many resonant voices here were raised to make this point: we don't have the men, and even if we did we shouldn't send them; in fact we should start talking about withdrawing the ones we've got because the whole thing is broken and cannot be mended. “We British,” wrote Matthew Parris on Saturday on these pages, “are at our limit and losing confidence in our usefulness.” Independent reports speak of a danger of failure and a “weakening international resolve”, and the few gains of our continued presence - “a few new schools and roads in the north”, according to Simon Jenkins in The Sunday Times - are insufficient to stop the country fragmenting.

And it is worse than that, they imply, because most of the problems that exist we have ourselves provoked and indeed spread to neighbouring Pakistan. “To have set one of the world's most ancient and ferocious people [the Pashtuns] on the warpath against both Kabul and Islamabad takes some doing. But Western diplomacy has done it,” says Jenkins; though why the Pashtuns are any more ancient than the rest of us, and why it should be so surprising that “one of the world's most ferocious peoples” might be relatively easily provoked, he doesn't explain. The tribal areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan, he argues, should have been left alone.

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Pertinent Links:

1) No retreat from the War on Terror